Shipping Label - Integrate with Royal Mail Click and Drop

[Jools]

Royal Mail supports integration with various online stores and marketplaces

Integration with Square would be great so that shipping labels could be automatically created, and postage paid

https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/click-how-to-guide.pdf

https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11716/~/click-%26-drop---connect-your-ch...

Regards

Jools

[#2]

Hello everyone, this is Alex from the Square Online product team. We know how frustrating it is to have been told that a Royal Mail Click & Drop integration is on the roadmap for two years, and we're sorry that we haven't yet been able to launch this for you. Behind the scenes, we're in the process of making some fundamental changes to our shipping product, so we decided to build all shipping carrier integrations (not just Royal Mail) in a way that aligns with our long term strategy. This will take us time to fully execute. We also understand that you have to make decisions about how to operate your business, and that an expectation of a Royal Mail integration has been a key factor in choosing to continue using Square. Unfortunately, we don't have a concrete update that we can share with you on our plans or timeline for this today, but we'll be sure to post in this thread when our beta is ready for you. 

[kellyj]

@Jools 

Thanks so much for this request. I'm looping in @JessRog who is our UK Beta Manager. 

We're closely working with the eCom team to make this a better experience for our international users. We'll let you know if we have updates on this issue. 

[tariqc]

its the same response as always - don`t expect this feature anytime soon if at all - my honest experienced opinion - how can a service (royalmail ) that provides ALL of its api and developer sdks to allow anyone to integrate with their platform not be easily added to ecom by square / weebly? simple answer = because its free and there is no margin or profit in it for Square

If we had access to webhooks / api library on ecom by square - I could , its not rocket science and you do not have t reinvent the wheel

Anyone within Square if you are reading this - there is no shame in getting outside help, contact the folks at woocommerce or another platform, get your self an automation engineer - they will help

FYI:-

https://help.parcel.royalmail.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360011462338

https://api.parcel.royalmail.com/ - a safe set of calls

[jaspersoaps]

I'm banging my head against my desk. I want to set up multiple different shipping options via Royal Mail for delivery in the UK. 
Royal Mail prices however, vary depending on weight, and package size, so I am finding it extremely convoluted having to back and forth between the RM Shipping Calc and the Square shipping rate set up for the different options and package size which depends on the number of items. 

Does anyone have experience or insight to offer on simplifying this? 

Is there any notice for UK Mail Carrier integration? I have seen forum posts from 2018 requesting this, but alas.. 

[tranguyen]

Hi @jaspersoaps, thank you for this requests.We don't have any integration that offer this at the moment but I've shared it with our Partnership team as a feature request! Out of interests, would you be looking for something like this? 

[doc_choc]

I have asked the same question a few times. It would be great, at the moment order fulfilment and shipping label printing is very difficult. Integration with Royal Mail Click and Drop would be a quick easy way to offer this to the UK. You can sign up for a Click and Drop account, its free, allows you to print labels but if you choose you do not need to use their service. No brainer Square!

[tranguyen]

Thanks so much for the feedback, @doc_choc! 

I know that our team are working with a few partners to setup shipping integration in the UK. Out of curiosity, aside from RoyalMail, do you use any other couriers like Hermes or DPD?

[ARMelts]

Hi! Great to hear yous are talking to a few different partners, DPD personally wouldn’t work for us as they only deliver parcels over a certain weight! I’m sure we wont be the only company that would have this problem, Hermes, DPD, Parcel Force they wouldnt be any good as they all operate fairly similar. Royal mail is the only good all round one which probably more than 80% of businesses use in the U.K

[tranguyen]

That's great information to have @ARMelts. I've let our team know why Royal Mail is the preferred method as well. I still don't have a definite timeline to share just yet - the team want to ensure our releases will be able to address what our sellers will need. Thanks again for your patience; I'll definitely bounce back when I have more information to share. 

[doc_choc]

Happy to do a screen share with Square so you can see how NOTHS have nailed the integration. When we accept an order NOTHS it automatically pushes to the order Royal MailClick and Drop portal (delivery details, mobile number, email address, order number etc) and creates an order. On a more sophisticated level it it can pull product weights and descriptions if you have a more repetitive product that one sells, and allows you to automatically assign postal services (ie tracked 24, 1st class large letter etc) to these, but more simplistically and would be a massive help is just to get the basic data in to Royal Mail Click and Drop so it creates an order and allows the user to manually assign postage. At the end of the day a manifest is generated, which sets the order in Click and Drop to dispatched and it then pings back the tracking number and change of status to NOTHS, job done....I have to say we love Square but fulfilment is awfully bad using Square the online system, its painful and leaves us exposed to errors when having to cut an paste order details across. I have been banging on for sometime about this but I did see this coming after lockdown one. It takes many hours to fulfil the orders with the same quantity on NOTHS taking 10 mins. We will be reluctantly looking at alternative platforms if Square can not find a solution to fulfilment. 😞

[tranguyen]

I really appreciate all your feedback @doc_choc. From the last update, we're working with two different partners to help integrate Royal Mail to Square Online site. However, we don't have a timeline to share just yet in case there is a delay. 

I've pushed for this again and I hope I'll be able to share more soon. 

[doc_choc]

Have you tried using the Royal Mail Click and Drop? Sign up for an account you can use this for free and if you set up an OBA with Royal Mail delivery options ie 1st/2nd class large letter, small parcel, tracked 24/48 etc. I believe these are available without an OBA, but the OBA will give better shipping rates. At the moment there is no square integration so you can either upload via an excel spreadsheet or manually input as we do. Manually inputting the order is time consuming but we find easier if you have orders coming through on Square Online all day. Plus we have problems exporting the square orders, it looks to email the orders but it takes forever at which point its obsolete on arrival. Manually inputting is subject to accidental errors. NoTHS have it nailed with their integration with Royal Mail Click and Drop. Hope this helps.

[Anicreatesncuts]

So ive done this by weight then set up shipping profiles for those weights so 0-100g £1 100g-250g £1.40 ect... it so far seems to have worked and ive not had any orders that havent covered the correct shipping costs 

[doc_choc]

Totally Support this. We use Royal Mail Click and Drop and note it integrates with Amazon, Big Commerce, eBay, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Not On the High Street, Etsy, Onbuy, Bluepark and KM.

It would be great, massively helpful and an easy win for Square to add this integration.

[doc_choc]

We are starting to build shipping momentum as we enter the busy Christmas season. At the moment we are having to cut and paste Square order details to create shipping labels in Royal Mails Click and Drop Dashboard, it takes forever and errors do creep in,

We also use NOTHS that interfaces with the Click and Drop, in less than 5 minutes we have the shipping labels sorted and printed, it also pings a response back to NOTHS with the tracking details and sets their system to order dispatched, again another massive time saver, Square cutting and pasting takes upwards of three hours daily to complete for a smaller numbers of orders, then we have to cut an paste and this is without the time required to input tracking numbers back in to Square.

Its a pretty painful exercise so anything you can do would help. We can download the orders and input in to the Royal mail spreadsheet and upload to Click and Drop, a compromise method, but we can not seem to download our daily orders from Square online. We request the orders and they never seem arrive in a timely fashion or at all sometimes. Also by interfacing with the Royal Mail Click and Drop you can use their label generation software and do not have to use their service (they state this somewhere small print), so it makes an ideal way for smaller businesses who need a means to generate shipping labels.

We have not quite hit the peak and it may be a little too late in the season for this to be looked at but it may be worth considering implementing if you can.

Many thanks 🙂

[ARMelts]

We really do need royal mail integration for us UK based companies! With royal mail being the biggest and most common method of deliveries i think this would be great as they cover all aspects of deliveries where as for the likes of hermes, dpd and parcelforce they have a weight criteria and for our business this isn’t any use. I think personally royal mail would be a game changer!!

[tranguyen]

Thank you for the feedback @doc_choc and @ARMelts. I've flagged this thread to our Partnership team and passed both your comments so the team can have a better understanding of how important it is to have a Royal Mail integration in market. We are working on this right now so I hope to have an update to share soon.

Right now, I know that through our integration with Shippo, you can connect with Hermes to help streamline the shipping process. If you use Hermes as a courier, it's worth looking into this option as well. 

[doc_choc]

Just had a message come up Royal Mail. and about celebrate...then the heart sank...they now have a square space direct integration. If you use a third party as you suggest there are fees applied and this really should be a standard part of the package including in the monthly fee we already pay. Shopify integration is free as is  SquareSpace now. You can't keep off loading core functionality to third parties and expect us to keep on paying. We need something for our monthly fee!

We are proud to announce our new integration for users with stores hosted by Squarespace.

[ARMelts]

Hi Phillip! How do you go about the integration? I cant actually see square as an integration option on the “add a new integration” on royal mail, has this to be updated as it has only just been announced? Or is it via square? I’m unsure 

[ARMelts]

Hi there im totally lost.. Our business is fairly new to square and still getting to grips with a few things. I can only see a new integration via royal mails click and drop service called “squarespace” I created my website on squareup.com, have weebly but i dont know much about squarespace or if thats even related or a completely different organisation. If royal mail has been integrated with square can someone please advise on how to set it up as we are keen to use it right away!  Thanks in advance 

[doc_choc]

Nope Squarespace is a different platform totally different to Weebly and Squareup I'm afraid. Got a little excited when I saw this pop up in an email from Royal Mail today, in the excitement my mind wiped the word space from my vision. I thought my prayers had been answered but alas not just yet. 😞